For its distinctive history and charm, Beaufort is a grand place to visit just about any time of the year. However, this weekend, the coastal town has an added attraction, the biennial induction festivities of the South Carolina Academy of Authors. From May 3-5, the SCAA in consort with the Pat Conroy Literary Center plays host to a number of events to welcome four more writers into the state’s literary hall of fame.
Among this year’s inductees is a lifelong resident of the Carolina Low Country, William P. Baldwin. Over his long literary career, he has worn many hats. Baldwin is a published historian with a number of books on Charleston to his credit. He is also an award-winning poet; his collection “These Our Offerings” won the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award. Baldwin can additionally claim to be a biographer of sorts, having attracted favorable critical attention for his oral histories “Mrs. Whaley and her Charleston Garden” and “Heaven is a Beautiful Place.”
Most readers know Baldwin best, however, as a novelist. His most celebrated work of fiction is “The Hard to Catch Mercy,” a coming-of-age novel set in a small Southern town (a fictional variant of McClellanville) in the early part of the 20th century. Viewed through the eyes of the young male protagonist, the book includes a rich assortment of fully developed characters, all placed within the cultural context of their time.
In short, there is no denying that Baldwin is a writer adept at a variety of literary forms. He even wrote an introductory narrative to Charlotte Jenkins’s cookbook “Gullah Cuisine: By Land and by Sea,” a classic of its type with illustrations by Jonathan Greene.
Another multi-talented inductee is Marcus Amaker. Last year I devoted a whole column to his latest verse collection titled “Hold What Makes You Whole,” published in 2023. Amaker has devoted most of his career to spreading the word about the value of poetry not only as the first poet laureate of Charleston but also as an artist-in-residence at the Gaillard Center and the organizer of the city’s Free Verse Poetry Festival.
He is also a recording artist, having generated over forty electronic music albums and collaborated with a number of Grammy Award-winning musicians. Music and musicality loom large in his work. He wrote a children’s book “Black Music Is” in 2021, and that same year his poetry was featured in a Presidential inauguration concert performed by the Washington National Opera.
This year’s third inductee also has produced work that spans a number of artistic forms. Currently an archivist at the College of Charleston, Harlan Greene has written three novels — his first, “What the Dead Remember,” won the Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction — but he is best known perhaps for his nonfiction volumes illuminating the history of the city he calls home. As a historian, he has contributed to books on such disparate topics as slave badges and cornices. “Mr. Skylark,” his biography of John Bennett, is one of the best books on the Charleston Renaissance, and his latest effort in the nonfiction category, “The Real Rainbow Row,” sheds light on a long-neglected aspect of the city’s storied history: the myriad contributions of the LGBTQ community.
The fourth and final 2024 inductee is being honored posthumously. A Beaufort native, Ann Head (1915-1968) was a popular novelist and short story writer. Many of her shorter works were published in magazines, and even some of her novels were serialized in the big periodicals of the day. Her most famous book, eventually marketed for young adults, was “Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.” Focused on the topic of teen pregnancy, the novel was made into a movie for television.
It’s not just Head’s Beaufort birth that makes her a particularly appropriate Low Country inductee this year; it’s also the fact that she taught creative writing to the town’s most celebrated author, Pat Conroy, in his senior year at the local high school. So indebted was Conroy to Ann Head as a role model that he once wrote, “Every time I sell a book, I put a rose on her grave.”
Every other year, the board of the S.C. Academy of Authors hosts an induction weekend focused on a different section of the state, alternating among the Low Country, Midlands, and Upstate. This year all the writers represent the Carolina coast; in 2020, all of the writers inducted into the South Carolina literary hall of fame had Aiken associations: Pam Durban, Andrew Geyer, James Matthews Legare, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
For more information on the work of the Academy and this year’s induction weekend in Beaufort, visit scacademyofauthors.com.
